WHAT JANUARY 1st MEANT TO YOUR ANCESTORS đ€
Americans are likely to think of New Yearâs Eve and New Yearâs Day as a time to celebrate the fresh start that a new year represents, but there is also a troubling side to the holidayâs history.
In the years before the Civil War, the first day of the new year was often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United States.
In the African-American community, New Yearâs Day used to be widely known as âHiring Dayâ â or âHeartbreak Day,â as the African-American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Nell described it â because enslaved people spent New Yearâs Eve waiting, wondering if their owners were going to rent them out to someone else, thus potentially splitting up their families. The renting out of slave labor was a relatively common practice in the antebellum South, and a profitable practice for white slave owners and hirers.
ââHiring Dayâ was part of the larger economic cycle in which most debts were collected and settled on New Yearâs Day,â says Alexis McCrossen, an expert on the history of New Yearâs Eve and New Yearâs Day and a professor of history at Southern Methodist University, who writes about Hiring Day in her forthcoming book Timeâs Touchstone: The New Year in American Life.
Accounts of the cruelty of Hiring Day come from records left by those who secured their freedom, who described spending the day before January 1 hoping and praying that their hirers would be humane and that their families could stay together.
âOf all days in the year, the slaves dread New Yearâs Day the worst of any,â a slave named Lewis Clarke said in an 1842 account.
âOn New Yearâs Day, we went to the auctioneerâs block, to be hired to the highest bidder for one year,â Israel Campbell wrote in a memoir published in 1861 in Philadelphia, in which he describes being hired out three times.
âThatâs where that sayinâ comes from that what you do on New Yearâs Day youâll be doinâ all the rest of the year,â a former slave known as Sister Harrison said in an interview in 1937âŠ
Americans are likely to think of New Yearâs Eve and New Yearâs Day as a time to celebrate the fresh start that a new year represents, but there is also a troubling side to the holidayâs history.
In the years before the Civil War, the first day of the new year was often a heartbreaking one for enslaved people in the United States.
In the African-American community, New Yearâs Day used to be widely known as âHiring Dayâ â or âHeartbreak Day,â as the African-American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Nell described it â because enslaved people spent New Yearâs Eve waiting, wondering if their owners were going to rent them out to someone else, thus potentially splitting up their families. The renting out of slave labor was a relatively common practice in the antebellum South, and a profitable practice for white slave owners and hirers.
ââHiring Dayâ was part of the larger economic cycle in which most debts were collected and settled on New Yearâs Day,â says Alexis McCrossen, an expert on the history of New Yearâs Eve and New Yearâs Day and a professor of history at Southern Methodist University, who writes about Hiring Day in her forthcoming book Timeâs Touchstone: The New Year in American Life.
Accounts of the cruelty of Hiring Day come from records left by those who secured their freedom, who described spending the day before January 1 hoping and praying that their hirers would be humane and that their families could stay together.
âOf all days in the year, the slaves dread New Yearâs Day the worst of any,â a slave named Lewis Clarke said in an 1842 account.
âOn New Yearâs Day, we went to the auctioneerâs block, to be hired to the highest bidder for one year,â Israel Campbell wrote in a memoir published in 1861 in Philadelphia, in which he describes being hired out three times.
âThatâs where that sayinâ comes from that what you do on New Yearâs Day youâll be doinâ all the rest of the year,â a former slave known as Sister Harrison said in an interview in 1937âŠ